I was playing in a $1000 dollar money tournament. My first round opponent dropped a 20 sided die as he sat down. It came up an 18 and he pointed at me and said, "your roll to see who goes first". I called a judge right away as I knew I was dealing with a cheater. I asked him, it if had come up a 1 would you have told me to roll or just went on with sitting down and arranging your stuff. Judge gave him a game loss for it. Then when we got around to playing our first actual game I saw him draw an extra card on his 2nd turn. I called the very same judge over and told him it was his turn 2 and to count his cards. He did in fact have an extra card. Instant match loss and dude went ballistic. I can't stand cheaters!!
You could tell the last guy was cheating because when the camera man asked “what turn is it?” Instead of just answering him he straight up says “2 explorers” which to me would indicate that he had his answer ready to go if anyone called him out on cheating, even if they weren’t calling him out on cheating yet…
Reminds me of a game of chess where a player called Inarkiev made an illegal move, then Magnus Carlsen moved in response, and any move at that point is considered illegal, and that guy called the arbiter and won the game on DQ. The result was later annulled and the win given to Carlsen
Another common one was deliberately skipping a draw, then calling the judge to get your opponent a game loss for drawing an extra card, and when the judge does a count they are up a card
"What turn is it?" "Two explores" No mention of lands, no "hey you've got too many lands," just asking what turn it is, and Alex immediately tries to cover his cheat
@@richfatman259 they’re supposed to ask both players to pause the game and call a judge. How many times did someone catch him do 2 explores and then he just puts a land back in his hand when no judge was around?
@@aqxbjc5879 If you did your order correctly and played only as many cards as you were allowed to, and thus have nothing to hide, you'd answer the question straight up. You wouldn't need to explain your actions until prompted further, because you would know what you did was a legit move that doesn't need justification. Dancing around the question is a good way to dodge the truth and immediately pegs you as suspicious. When someone asks you a question and you don't give a straightforward answer, it means you either don't know the answer (not the case here), or you've got something to hide (exactly the case here).
It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy that some amateur Chris Angel is gonna try to cheat with sleight of hand card tricks in a card game called magic.
Someone who's good at card tricks can shuffle cards from the bottom to the top and vice versa. So instead of hovering the cards at the top, they could have shuffled them down and back up again, easily obfuscating the hover. This would also give them the option to set up worse hands for their opponents by checking the bottom and shuffling up more bad cards. I've dabbled in card tricks and seeing this kind of lazy cheating made me cringe. It also makes me assume there's a lot of people better at it that aren't getting caught.
In 1994 my roommate invited Mike Long and another player who was in his playtesting crew to play at our apartment. I was a budget player at that time and he refused to play a game if his opponents didn't put up an ante so we never played head to head. His cards were curved because he used a bridge shuffle and when he turned them he didn't actually turn them he just started them spinning; At one point, when he was playing against my friend, he tapped a land by starting it spinning and when it stopped it looked like he hadn't tapped it. He tried to tap it a second time, my friend called him out for it and Mike's friend told me that he'd once seen Mike tap the same land three times in a turn.
I have no idea how this game works, and I'm unsure why the YT algorithm brought me here, but I'm somehow invested. Can you give me a quick explanation of the tapping mechanic/rule of this game?
@@ThRoWBaCkTeXaS Some cards can only be used once per turn. To indicate that they've been used you're supposed to turn them 90 degrees. At the start of your next turn you're allowed to turn them back to normal.
I like how a "four year sentence" is ridiculous for misconduct that took place in a trivial card game, even though that sentence is just a ban from that trivial card game
I love self victimisation to insane degrees. Like comparing himself to serious criminals, buddy no is calling for you to go to jail you just can't play this card game professionally.
I had to read this again and I first thought "wait a minute, he actually did go to jail or what?"... because a 4 year sentence is 4 years in jail and nothing else. So... that one guy is quite crazy to use the term "sentence" when it is nothing more than a game ban from a card game like Magic. Okay, if you are a pro player and you have only that to generate income then it is quite devastating. But maybe you should have a backup plan and study something more than only card game playing.
"DARVO is an acronym for 'deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender'. It refers to a reaction that alleged perpetrators of wrongdoing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior." As you can see, HE was the real victim, and you keyboard cagefighters are under attack.
Best part about the Trevor guy’s outburst is how it undermines itself at every turn. Saying it’s just a card game and comparing it to murder, when your only punishment was that you temporarily can’t play that very game competitively… seems exactly relevant and proportional lol
Good old Mike Long. I would have had an invite spot a bajillion lifetimes ago, but his cheating and leveraging his name to the judge meant he got the win because he drew 5 extra cards. The judge after 20 minutes of talking to Long decided there was simply no way to be able to count how many cards each player should have by that turn in the game, which is absolute non-sense on turn 12 or so. Of course you can figure out the number of cards and Mike had 5 too many. He was trying his be annoying and rush the game when he was loosing. He would then keep trying to rush the end of my turn to his draw phase, so he'd go ahead and cup his hand over his deck like he was ready to draw and keep running his thumb across the back edge/corner of the cards to be able to pull two but make it look like 1. He tried to be loud and boisterous because there was a crowd watching and also acting like I was simply just taking too much time, although I was perfectly within my allotted time per phase/turn. It was really easy for me to notice the extra cards he ended up with because Hymn to Tourach and Hypnotic Spector do pretty specific things to your hand size, so it didn't take a genius to see what was happening since I was playing discard against him and had wrecked his hand in the first 2 turns of game 3. This made me question how he pulled off game 2 against me as well, but I was too focused on me and my play and didn't pay attention until things shifted so much during game 3. I ended up hearing it was actually that judge and the shop owner that got him to come to that qualifier in the first place and paid for his travel/expenses, but who can say. At least there aren't videos all over the internet of me acting like an unsportsmanlike d*ck and coming in #2 on MTGGoldfish's cheaters list. I guess I am a tiny bit salty because back then as a teenager I was trying so hard to qualify, driving insane distances, having to hustle ever local tournament, draft, and sealed within 100 miles 4 or 5 days a week like a job to earn enough cards to sell to fund these out of town qualifier attempts. I pretty much gave up after that because I didn't see a use when someone could so blatantly cheat and but get handed the win because he was a "known" player. So there is my sad Mike Long story.
That sucks. I hate that it happened, especially after all the work you put in, and it’s really terrible that he leveraged his position as this great pro player to beat you unfairly. It makes me feel lucky that I never went through this at any level of competitive play I’ve taken part in. I hope you find some solace in that he got caught and that his name was tarnished.
I started playin in 94 and was hitting ptqs as a 12ish year old and was really good for a kid. Even won a JSS. I feel I was cheated a lot tho at ptqs since I was young and naive. I even caught a guy at ptq straight rip an extra card, judge did nothing since it I think they were friends.
Mike Long actually taught me to play mtg. He was a super nice and generous guy .... until you played against him and he was ruthless and bent any rule he could to win even just a casual match.
Once had regular EDH play group at a hobby store. (12 regulars) This one dude always had the best luck when it came to drawing what he needed. Real “Heart of the cards” stuff. One day, I was using a mill deck and targeting him hard. Someone did the math on his graveyard and accused him of having more than 100 cards. Turns out that the bastard always played with a dozen extra cards in his pocket or on his lap. How we never noticed is beyond me! Never showed his face at the store again.
Genuinely baffled at how badly you must hate yourself to need so terribly to feel good about yourself that you cheat in the lowest stakes possible, casual commander lmfao, what a loser
@blazestudios23 my dude people are cheating in all sorts of casuals games and sports everyday everywhere. It's because they are weak and totally dependant on winning
Anyone else remember that Dredge player who cracked a fetch for Stomping Ground, realised he'd milled all his copies and just scooped one of them out of the GY in order to "find" it while searching his deck? Blew my mind how jaw-droppingly obvious it was, like he had forgotten the match was on camera or something
He got caught cheating at my LGS for that. It was absolutely rediculous and everyone who played locally at the time followed it very closely. It was super disappointing
Dan Lanthier was one of the most antagonistic pos I've ever encountered n tournaments back when I played locally. He was always telling others off, always trying to pull a quick one of people, calling judges for no reason other than try to fish for a game loss for his opponent.
Bertoncini was my first opponent at my first ever PTQ way back in the day. And to this day I’m sure he cheated his mana count off his 2 Lotus Cobras to resolve both Avenger of Zendikar and Time Warp in one turn to stop me from winning 2-1. Couldn’t prove it so I let it go, but it was nice to feel vindicated once the “2 explores” thing happened a few years later.
I read your story over on Pleasantkenobis channel just the other day! What a shitter thing to do man. I'm sorry you got matched up with a buttolug of a player.
@@christophermccullough9986 thanks. Lol funny yeah I did post it on both, they both dropped this video and I couldn’t resist lol. Bertoncini also used to come around my LGS for about 6 months or so, and right after he won that star city games sealed 10K he was arrogantly betting people they couldn’t build his sealed deck out of his pool (he didn’t show people what anyone came up with just said right or wrong and how far off). No one was even close. Then I went, I built his deck card for card without knowing it, bar only two cards, which he admitted were the two cards he was super on the fence about building it. I think he gave me a pack or something, I don’t remember. But he looked super annoyed, and he stopped doing it after that, which is the part worth remembering for me XD
The fact that he was last seen trying to scam-sell bogus NFTs is the perfect epilogue to his sad dishonorable tale. I'm sorry he cheated you at that game store long ago, but be at peace knowing that his path came to a dead-end.
@@bluesuncompanyman lol, I happen to know he does poker these days. When he was an LGS local I added him on FB and just never deleted or interacted with him. Most of his time is spent posting pictures of poker tournaments he claims to be winning lots of money at (probably cheating there too if so) and mild to moderately offensive memes.
I was the reanimator player mentioned at 22:48, pretty sure my claim to fame in mtg lore is being the first person with documented evidence of Alex cheating. The reason theres no footage because this was a text-only feature match. Firstly, I was friends with GerryT at the time and on day 1 we put together a reanimator list for legacy day 2, which was how Alex knew what I was playing. IIRC, he had played a Sower main deck at a previous but recent SCG so he had plausible deniability. He cast a sower to steal my reanimated platinum angel to kill me while i was at negative life. He was caught by me one week later, when i pulled up his 2nd place merfolk list to build for a legacy local, and stared in disbelief. I contacted the SCG TO, and after a couple weeks of discussion with them they basically said they talked to him and he said it was a mistake and they believed him. And lets be real, they wanted to believe him, he was their star. It would have been a scandal. I beat him a couple years later in a ptq quarterfinal, and I watched him like a hawk but the matchup was so lopsided in my favor that it didnt matter. And I won the ptq which was dope.
My favorite example of Jared Boettcher cheating is the game against Thomas Ross you showed clips from, because he was so focused on cheating he actually gave Thomas the land he NEEDED to beat him the next turn, and he was obviously mana screwed up to that point.
Jared was an idiot from my local MTG community and I think what was exceptionally frustrating was watching people herald him. I’ve even heard the people who taught him the cheat are the ones that helped call him out for it later. I also think this video as a whole is pathetic. Really shows the state of modern magic if we have to make a video about the trash from the past.
@@deatheater9007 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ look at the view count of this video compared to ever single other video MTGgoldfish has uploaded on here in the last month. This is the one with most views. Not trying to be antagonistic just calling it how I see it.
Lessons from this video: -Always SHUFFLE your opponent's deck in a Magic match with stakes, don't just cut. If they don't present, ask to shuffle. If they repeatedly fail to present, call a judge. -Pay attention to the little lapses in attention that favor your opponent. True sloppy play will favor the opponent in my experience certainly less than half the time but maybe somewhere between 20-25% of the time. Cheated "sloppy" play is calculated never to give up an edge. -Pay attention to the nagging feeling of doubt that you can't put a finger on. Trust your instincts and don't let seemingly innocent breaches of the rules pass without a judge call. Warnings are important for judges to dish out because they allow habitual cheaters to be sniffed out more easily. TL;DR Call a judge, pay attention, trust your instincts, CALL A JUDGE
best lesson from this video tournaments over a certain size have some odd edge case tension where ppl who aren't cheating are dq'd and people who are are fine. all for prizes that arent' worth the time investment for anyone over 30 complied with software from the 90's. I like magic but sort of hate tournemnt mtg.
Also, call a judge on yourself if you make an honest mistake. Yeah, sometimes you accidentally play an extra land, draw an extra card, forget to de-sideboard, miss a mandatory trigger, etc. When this happens, you need to call judge and be ready to accept a potential game loss. What you don't want is a lifetime ban because "accidentally cheating" and failing to fess up to that accident is the same as deliberately cheating.
At my first local tournament way back when Ixalan was about to come out, I played vs someone who, without any possible reason, was just looking at the top cards of their deck when they thought I wasn't looking. I think it was because they were playing red deck wins and needed to know if they could get lethal or not before I could combo. Called a judge and unfortunately he didn't do anything because he didn't see it and said it didn't matter. He and the cheater obviously knew each other. I later played against that judge in an FNM at a different shop. He didn't remember me. When I won our draft match up, he got mad that I was thinking on my turns and lost it when he finally lost the game. Really nasty and angry guy. Looking back, I think he did know his friend cheated but chose to do nothing because he didn't care about fairness and I wasn't going to top 8 anyway.
fabrizio Anteris mindset comes down to a sense of entitlement that makes me shiver. in his mind, he DESERVED to beat those 'lesser' players so he could have a shot to play against the better players, he wanted to play with good players and didnt feel he actually needed to earn it or prove himself so he simply cheated to sweep the lesser players out of his way and not risk losing to them. his wins were something he deserved, not something to be earned.
That mindset is THE reason why skill is not a defense against accusations of cheating. It's a remarkably common problem in other competitive hobbies like speedrunning, where top players still sometimes cheat because they feel they are owed results.
There's a big cheating scandal in chess right now and the kid who is accused of doing it, over the board, said that he did cheat in the past (online) for this exact reason: He wanted to play better players. And I hear so many voices that say they understand that reason. And I really don't get it. If you want to play better players... PLAY BETTER. There's really no other way. How can one be so entitled to do this stuff? I would hate myself.
@@KyussTheWalkingWorm How do they not see such a blatant logical error? If they're really good enough to play with the best, then why would they need to cheat to ensure they play with the best? Sure you can get dealt a bad hand and lose because of that, but that can happen just as easily against the better players too. Such a bizarre sense of entitlement.
@@scorpiusbalthazar4327 They _absolutely_ cheat when they play the better players, as long as they think they can get away with it (and sometimes even when they don't). Because inevitably they either realise that they simply don't have the skills to beat these 'better players' _unless_ they cheat, or they convince themselves that they _deserve_ to win and cheat out of hubris or instinct.
It's really stressful not only thinking about your plays but constantly having to watch what your opponent is doing with his deck. That's why I left the competitive circuit because cheaters are more common than they seem.
I was playing at Brothers Grimm when Humphries got caught cheating. The next week at draft everyone was awkward. At the time I didn’t know what happened and someone told me. A friend of mine who played against him told me he was an intimidating jerk. And then I looked it up and saw his response and how his cards were up for sale. I loved it.
I also played at Grimm for a while, and Humphries had also gotten his ass kicked and his face broken when he called a POC the n-word, then repeated it again when the other guy got angry and threw a chair at him.
@@DustinRobbins-iz9hi So physical violence is okay for using words? Wild take. That sort of mindset has no place in a civilized society, it's fascist behavior.
All of this shuffle cheating could be solved by forcing an aproximate 50/50 cut before the deck is returned to the player. Also, watching some one vigorously shuffle your 2,500 dollar modern deck like that would drive me insane.
It would me too. But they have so many copies of said cards it doesn’t bother them. That or they have been playing so long they just no longer care. It’s their career and they will get more cards as sets come out. They will always have cards to throw around.
It's possible to shuffle your opponents deck in a way that does basically no damage (no riffling). Most people that play Magic competitively today know how to do that. Of course it was different in the old days though.
I still can't get over the Stephen Speck one; dude was a close friend in college when this happened, looked up to him and everything. Then this happened. Haven't talked to him in years now, he really vanished.
Only cheater i caught that never came back was a dude who tried to draw 4 on a 2 card draw spell. When he got in my face about it, i called a judged and he left before the judge could arrive at our table. When i explained to the judge, the judge agreed i was in the right and the guy had been a known problem in the circuit but was a close friend to event organizers.
Good video, but it's a shame there was no mention of Chris pikula. Chris pikula is an early pro tour legend who basically forfeited his rightful spot in the pro tour hall of Fame for his crusade against cheating. In a video about cheating I feel like it's worth an honorable mention to talk about pikulas commitment to fairplay.
Pikula is a hero. I just bought two near mint Planeshift Meddling Mages that cost about 5x as much as the cheapest option because that man has to be honored.
Jason Gordon should have been in that list somewhere as most of the 90's cheaters wouldn't have been doing what they did without him. His father was a lawyer who threatened to sue WOTC when he was caught cheating. He forced a whole handful of rules to get changed in the early days of competitive MTG
@@MTGGoldfish He was from Connecticut. He played at a lot of the early Gray Matter tournaments that Glen and BDM put on in the mid 90's. His antics were mostly at early years of the pro tours that he got DQ'd at. I was a judge in CT running large tournaments back then and had to constantly deal with his nonsense as a judge and also as a player. He was really where the term "rules lawyering" came from.
I think (99% that was his name) that's who cheated me in the Albany limited PTQ finals (after I'd just beat David Price to advance). He played a card from his graveyard. I caught the cheat immediately by inspecting his graveyard and seeing the card he'd played earlier was no longer there. He was well known to literally everyone as a cheater. But judging was so basic back then they weren't even really paying attention to the match much lol. Luckily I got support from onlookers, so even though we both got warnings (which still irks me), his illegal game action was denied and I won in the end.
There's one guy at my local shop that will try and tell me I'm playing wrong if he's at disadvantage. I've flashed their attacking creature during combat, and I've attacked with my 3/3, they swing in with their 4/4, and I cast a +2/+2 on my creature. They tell me that's not how the game works. Well isn't that how instants work?!
Would love to see this video done for Pokemon cheaters. So many big names come to mind. Xiao Xiao Long, Jimmy Pendarvis, Rahul Reddy, Cal Conner, Gino Lombardi, etc. Would be a great video
Yeah, at least I learned something more. Wants to cheat some people out of money in other ways now since he can't do it in MTG. Bertoncheaty such a scumbag. Outside of matches I'm pretty convinced that him being super nice to people was just to cover up his cheating and have defenders willing to talk him up.
You neglected to also mention that Saito was removed from his position at Hareruya earlier this year after getting arrested and indicted for illegal gambling (poker, though there's no indication of cheating there).
I missed that part of the story (although as an American where poker is sort of illegal but wildly accepted that whole situation is really weird to me now that I read up on it, it must be cultural differences().
@@dark_rit they do loopholes such as winning tickets that you can redeem at another location for money or the prize. You know gambling but by the rules it is not considered gambling
@@MTGGoldfish if he's hosting poker nights at a game store he works at tho, that would be clearly illegal in the US as well as Japan. There's leeway for friendly gambling, but doing it as part of a business is a no no in practically every US state.
I tried competitive play back in the late 90's. I quickly realized that not only were probably 1/3rd of players cheaters, but hobby shops enabled it. See, if you were a regular customer of XYZ shop and spent a lot of money there monthly, they'd overlook your cheating to avoid losing you as a customer. I played in probably 20-30 tournaments(in my home state of Kentucky and in Michigan where my cousins lived and I regularly visited) and I don't think I ever saw a legit winner a single time. One store in Michigan even straight up told me and my cousin that "their guy" spends hundreds a month there and could do whatever he wanted, openly in front of a score of other players. That was one of the last tourney's I played and I've not looked back at competitive MtG since.
Yeah, the mistakes always being in the favour of the player is a pretty big signpost. I have some friends that play Warhammer, and whenever there's a new edition, a rules update, or just something that doesn't come up too often, one player in particular always seems to understand the rule in such a way that it maximises the benefit to him. Not necessarily cheating in that case, but a willingness to not dig deeper and just accept the first answer that's good for him.
40k is full of cheaters that do that very thing. With confusing as hades rules strung out between the codex's, supplemental books, and the rulebook. Then you have the FAQ for the rules and each codex. It would take a librarian to keep up with all the factions
The other hard part about 40k is eventually, if you've been playing long enough, editions start blurring together. Yeah, it's a bit suspicious if someone seems to always benefit from forgotten rules, but it's also understandable they miss the fine print in the FAQ of a White Dwarf that nerfed something that was unchanged for over a decade.
@@nekrataali isnt there like, a comprehensive rules guide? I dont play the table top, but that situation sounds like a judge could just google whats correct?
That first one reminds me of the Super Smash Bros player who unplugged his controller mid match, and his opponent paused the game as a courtesy. He then called for a PENALTY to the opponent since pausing is against the rules (technically true). Thankfully the judges shut him down and told him to just play.
Damn, this recap really makes you appreciate just how easy it is to rig the outcomes of tournaments, especially when such high-status people defend and protect cheaters from punishment.
Cool video. I knew most of them, but seeing it in this condesed form blew me away. Also, what I took away from this: holy moly, Magic was on MTV in the 90s??
crazy how in Magic u can play illegally and just pass it off as "just playing sloppy", in yugioh even a slight illegal move would be an automatic loss if not a repairable game state...
There was a player known for cheating, at a Sydney GP, that intentionally played a card wrong. It was pointed out to him a few times that he was playing it wrong and he accepted it, but lots of players didn't realize. The same judge never saw him do it twice in the tournament. We pieced it together afterwards, but didn't have a paper trail.
as a new player this is a very helpful video. i now know i need to keep an eye on my opponent's moves. i haven't been directly exposed to cheating but i have played against a player who rushed my turns and tried to get me to fold when he had a big board state. while not necessarily cheating, it is an annoying and distracting tactic that tries to take my head out of the game and disrupt my focus. i would call it unfair sportsmanship
Here's a bit more info about Alex getting banned for the last time. He was playing in a smaller event in upstate NY, and he tried to take a Hardened Scaled off of an Ancient Stirrings in modern. He got called out and judges reported him to WOTC.
I started in '94 and I think the idea of mana weaving not being bad just came fron the fact that winning because an opponent got too much/too little land just wasn't fun and didn't really show how well your deck was designed or your skill level. Before they intstituted the mulligan rule, it wasn't uncommon at local tourneys I played in to see players allow their opponent to reshuffle and draw a full hand if they showed a starting hand with only one or no land or nonland cards. Also, land destruction decks were quite common back in the day and starting off low on land against one meant you were pretty much done so that probably played a role in how weaving was seen at the time as well.
The no land/all land mulligan was actually the first official mulligan.DCI made it official in 1994. Before then, there just wasn't any mulligans at all.
The Mark Justice thing is a little more complicated than him just cheating, he came from a Mormon family and he cut ties with most of them because they disapproved of Magic. In his newfound freedom and fame, he started getting into drugs and would even go to tournaments tripping on acid or high on cocaine. He became unhappy with his new life, and he has said since then that the muscle sliver incident was him hoping to get caught so that he could be forced to stop, a little self-sabotage in that way. I highly suggest reading Generation Decks by Titus Chalk, it's a history of MTG that talks a lot about Mark Justice's story.
Perhaps I judge too harshly, but I never buy the whole "I wanted to be caught" line. It's just something people say to express remorse when in fact they were sloppy and would continue cheating if they could.
I think I must have missed something in the video but can you explain why buying a Muscle Sliver from a vendor was "cheating?" Was it a counterfeit or what?
@@adamj93 It's been a minute since I watched the video but if I recall correctly they were working off a draft event where you are limited to the cards drawn at the start of the event. I may be mistaken though, been a while.
@S V Literally yes, there is a video defending him from someone at the pro tour I think it was a judge, his sleeves were checked before round 15 and after it they were fine, then he was intentionally drawing already in the top 8 and they were marked? It makes no sense why he would mark them AFTER he had gotten top 8 why wouldn't he cheat the round he needed to win to get in top 8?
Loved this style of breakdown with the use of tournament footage that shows the cheating. It’s Super informative as someone who always heard about how these players had cheated, but never saw any of the images or footage that showed it. It gives me a better idea of what to look for when playing in person. As an aside, I like that you can shuffle an opponent’s deck and your opponent can shuffle your deck, but I would also like there to be a rule that allowed you to cut your own deck when your opponent hands it back after they shuffled it in order to reduce an opponent’s ability to stack your top cards. To be clear I’d only like such a rule to allow for you to cut your deck (not shuffle a 2nd time) and you’d be allowed to do this cut ONLY IF your opponent shuffled your deck.
@@scorpiusbalthazar4327 1988 Men's 100m final. Seven of the eight runners were caught using PEDs at one time or another. Honestly, that decade was a really sketchy time for athletics.
To be fair, to be a successful Magic cheater, you've got to be good at psychology and head games and Alex was certainly good at those. And those are also the qualities of a successful poker player - even an honest one. So it does check out, but doesn't necessarily mean he's cheating at poker.
It's way harder to cheat at poker if I'm assuming it to be texas hold 'em where you are dealt 2 cards, and have the flop, turn, and river available to everyone and those are controlled by the dealer.
you'd better not try to cheat when playing poker. the high stakes call for far more severe control over players and if you get caught there you don't simply get disqualified but also face criminal law
I was a lvl 2 yugioh Judge. We had a guy who was rich and stole side decks, then because the side decks were only like $250 they couldn't do anything about it. The place had cameras and eventually a person got pissed off and told them that there side deck was $750 worth and had requested a police report and video of the scene. He was arrested 😂
@@fellshaw7058 Commander isn't tournament magic where you can be disqualified. I've seen playgroups with house rules that allow a player that missed two early game drops to exchange their draw to tutor a basic.
Yeah, one of the most common complaints is manascrew/flood. Then some people say it's a feature, not a bug. Then you have digital card games and such that don't have manascrew/flood at all where it is much appreciated that they don't have screw/flood.
@@dark_rit I also believe screw/flood is a feature not a bug. I just acknowledge that weaving isn't really that bad because you still get to shuffle the opponent's library.
@@yujiro424 I agree that it's a feature: Well constructed decks with good manabases will generally mulligan less frequently and have better draws. As you rightly say though, any playgroup can play using whatever rules makes the game for fun for them.
Oh my God, the absolute cherry on top at the very end. He has a literal full Bingo card of grifts and scams. That was a masterfully assembled breakdown and it culminates in this completely unexpected and sublime final revelation...! I feel like the critic at the end of Ratatouille. Bravo, Seth! Bravo!
I never got anywhere near a championship but a buddy of mine used to lie to win games. One example, I built a deck around the Kor damage transfer ability. When he realized he couldn't reliably break it -- not that I was consistently winning, mind you, just that he couldn't go 4-1 against it -- he told me the ability had been errata'd away, it simply didn't exist anymore. When I expressed doubt, he shrugged and told me I was "cheating, but if you wanna play anyway....." As if he was willing to do me the favor of lowering himself to play me after he was the one who lied. He'd lie about how combat timing worked so you couldn't block his creatures, then lie in the opposite way during your attack so HIS card would work when it shouldn't have, lie about how mulligan worked to make your hand even smaller, anything he thought he could get away with. Never occurred to me until watching this video that he was probably shuffling dirty and palming cards on top of everything else. No wonder he always had Fork and Mox Ruby in his starting hand. I am such an idiot. Anyway, I started carrying and reading the full "lawyer version" of the rules and up-to-the-minute errata on my decks. When he realized he was going to get called out literally every time, he wouldn't play me anymore. It was a moral victory.
I genuinely blame starcity judges for how many cases of cheaters there are, 9 times outta 10 they are barely watching games and barely know the rules. I watched a standard event and they had to call 4 judges for a simple rule clarification. It is sad to see what is essentially a referee not paying attention to a match.
@@erickwalter2828 it doesn't help they pretty much just take whoever as a judge, it isn't even that hard of a job. Oh yeah I left out the best part of the 4 judges trying to figure out the rule clarification in the end one of them just googled it and figured it out in like 10 seconds after wasting minutes gathering and discussing. Google does a better job than a starcity judge, great look on one of the biggest mtg companies.
@@WGG-01 maybe for L1 but the L2 exam is notoriously difficult. An L2 understands the rules of magic better than someone who has played during every set release ever.
@@tomgoodman1965 Maro has a whole podcast talking about that time in the game, where he basically says the brand team hated the actual game itself, so they went out of their way to do everything to sell the game except actually show the card game itself.
I strongly considered punching Bertoncini once. It was right after he'd come back from a suspension in 2013 and I played a Legacy side event he was also in where he treated me like an idiot for not agreeing to a prize split. As a grinder at the time I obviously knew he was an amoral sociopath from being in the tournament scene with him. I got uppaired against an opponent who I could have conceded to for a slightly more favorable split and instead squashed them. He approached me after the match and asked why I didn't concede and I told him that I came to game. He rolled his eyes comically and said "that was dumb." I refrained only because I was serious about the game at the time and didn't want to get a lifetime ban. Now that I no longer play I really wish that I had rearranged his smug face because it absolutely would have been worth it.
I'm there with you brother. I played against Alex once and his friend twice. Both were utter scumbags as soon as you weren't "nice enough" to let them get their way.
I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a standard procedure for exactly how you must shuffle your own deck and cut your opponents. I think the lack of variance in this procedure would eliminate a lot of options for cheating, create awareness for the avenues that someone could cheat, and reduce cheating overall
I think you should be allowed a final, single cut after your deck is presented back you. That way the crap of getting cards pushed or pulled from the top of the deck, (or stuff potentially sent to the bottom) is trivialized.
At Comp REL and higher you just present your deck to your opponent. Your opponent then confirms that it’s sufficiently randomized by cutting, shuffling or doing nothing to it. If you fail to do so it could result in a Tournament Error - Insufficient Shuffling penalty. These upgrade to a Game Loss after the first TE-IS warning.
While this is true, it would also end in a lot of warnings for players who are new to the scene who simply don't know the "standardized procedure" for shuffling
I mean, the current system is basically perfect so long as you watch your opponent to make sure they don't glance at the cards in your deck to stack it. Just allowing a cut isn't going to help anything, it will just make things worse. If a cheater is allowed to cut their deck after it's presented back to them, you're just allowing them to stack their deck. If the opponent is only allowed to cut, that's so easy to take advantage of via any number of methods that magicians can employ.
David Williams should have at least an honorable mention, since while he is a very nice person and a wonderful magic player, and an outright celebrity in his own right from poker and other stuff, he was indeed caught cheating at one of the biggest tournaments of the year, Worlds 2001
Weird story, IIRC he was banned 10 years for some damaged accumulated knowledge, just because the cards bend ad his opponents easly happen to cut the deck right on them. But yeah he use the ban to become a great poker player, and aslo turn to play magic too as soon as the ban expire. A very cool guy, and probably an exagerated punishment for him...
I heard of one other instance of him cheating where he had double Koth of the Hammer in a draft deck or something like that, which just wouldn't happen in a draft unless you had insane luck.
@@enricocarlini5363 He was banned basically because they were the only foils in his deck and the fact that they had warped meant they were 'marked cards' (and it was a key card in the deck). I suspect he probably wasn't intentionally cheating, but at the same time it wasn't completely unreasonable for WotC to assume that he was.
Seeing all the punishments in a row, I kinda would also freak out at being handed a 4 year ban if you off set it to Berticini who got two bans for more with less time.
Excellent content! While I of course love gameplay videos, I would love to see more of this kind of stuff. Maybe "worst interpretations of new spoilers" or "most contentious card bannings".
Fabrizio is the worst on this list in my opinion, calling other players lesser as an explanation as to why your cheating is way more scummy in my opinion, cheating because you know your better then another player and give yourself an unfair advantage, disrespectful to all those players that he knocked out of the tournament
I actually played against Tomoharu Saito at a side event once. I asked about the name Hareruya 晴れる屋, and he said it was not based on Hallelujah, but rather hare = sunny and ya = store.
If you are caught intentionally cheating then you should be banned from competitive play for life. These people have demonstrated they lack morals and will continue to cheat because it is worth the advantage they get if the price they pay if they are caught isn't substantial.
There's been a debate about that too. Personally I think people should get a second chance, but then if you get caught cheating again you should probably get lifetime ban.
@@MTGGoldfish I can understand that position and think giving people a second chance can be a good thing but unfortunately the more lenient you are the more honest players that would get screwed over and I rather minimize that as much as possible. Plus I don't have much faith that people that have cheated won't do it again. I am curious what those statistics would look like. Thank you for the reply and the video.
I think allowing them back once is fine depending on the nature of their cheats. Twice, I don't think so because they're just there to try and reap as much profits as they can before lifetime ban.
Never ceases to amaze me. "Wow guys. I'm not a criminal. I just did the one single most awful thing you can do in a card tournament...and the i got banned from that card tournament for doing that awful thing. Come on guys, unfair."
Remembers me that the first video of paper magic after initial covid was somebody dropping a land after casually moving a Wasteland from their hand to the graveyard, destorying opps land
Something that I've seen from speedrunning is that it's usually the good players that are cheating. They're the ones with the knowledge to actually cheat effectively, and the better you are the more you want to eliminate luck from the equation because "I'm so good, i deserve this win, the deck is just fucking me over"
Wow, I didn't know it was like all of this. I just played for the fun and challenge. I played against someone a very long time ago in a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament just to see how it went. This kid just kept putting cards down and stared at me. Then got mad. I had to ask what it was that he played and what did it do. He yelled for a judge who told him that he was required to explain the card function since not everyone has every card memorized. He let out this noise and sulked. So here I am, at 21, playing against this teenager who is getting pissy about having to explain a card. He gets more aggressive with every time I ask. Couple this with my defensive deck that was about destroying his hand and deck, not life points, and he started throwing a tantrum. Now people are watching and it's getting worse because they're laughing too. He had played something that made discarded graveyard cards go out of play and it worked against him. Half of his deck was out of the game in about 6 turns. Finally he just yells that he forfeits the whole match because it was boring and he would lost by deck out. It turned out he had been the terror of these tournaments every weekend and had won in the double digits. He was mean-spirited and known to mock the youngest players. Never shook hands before or after a game and was known to end a match in single digit turns. He stormed outside with screaming and cursing about trash players. Never wanted to humiliate anyone but I heard that he never came back after that. The store banned him.
Glad that you note that there are basically two eras of cheating: The early stuff in the '90s (Long, Justice) and then the stuff in the early-to-mid 2010s on the Pro Tour and (especially) SCG circuits where a ton of these guys got busts. The latter group, guys just cheating plainly on camera, is the most infuriating. (Then again, that's when I was playing competitively, and I played against some of those jackasses... so I admit it's a bit personal.)
*I wasn't really aware how much of it was going on in the Long Justice era* though I played at about a dozen Pro Tours & averaged > top 32. No real point in sticking with it back then 'cause no year-long tour spots like golf. Shoulda got into poker much sooner in fact. Wonder how I would have done if no one was mana-weaving & such. I never did, had to be rather a big disadvantage. OTOH the satisfaction of knowing I beat cheaters w/o cheating is a nice bonus in 2022.
I have to disagree. When this much gets caught on camera on live coverage, there is omnipresent rampant cheating at all levels. Frankly i would say if a pro can only perform in paper (and not on MTGO) well... it should be a red flag.
The old bloom titan deck could actually kill on turn 1 with hive mind. T1 you go exile simian spirit guide for 1 mana, play amulet, play a bounce land for 2, play summer bloom, play the bounce land 3 more times to cast hive mind and then cast summoners pact and your opponent loses on their upkeep
My very first local draft tournament, I excitedly confided in my first opponent that I'd reached 8th place on Planeswalkers 2013 leaderboards for xbox, so I was looking forward to doing well in this event. He airily declared preconstructed deck users as noobs (an odd comment to make at a draft). A few turns in, he declares that if I draw before untapping my mana one more time he'll make me take mana burn. I ignored him, but he pushed the subject so aggressively I had to call a judge over to explain to him that there is no mana burn. Forfiet the second game, I went on to place second. Never saw that loser again.
Well you weren't playing by the rules. Untap, upkeep, draw. Ignoring that pattern messes with the game's rhythm and can be confusing. He should have called the judge on you instead of making up random rules about mana burn.
At SCG Boston in 2011 Calosso Fuentes hit 4 flash freeze in games 2 and 3 very quickly against me with little deck manipulation. That loss knocked me out of top 16. A few weeks later he was banned for cheating. Absolutely infuriated me. edit: had typo in his first name.
I was playing in a tournament against this guy, absolutely dominated the first game and he said "Damn, it's over, I lost" and stared me for a couple of seconds. I thought "oh, okay, let's go for game two", took my deck and started to shuffle. He didn't said anything until I started to shuffle, then he said "oh what? No, I didn't surrender" I was baffled. I knew what he just did. He inmediately called a judge. I just took the L and went to game 2. Still won the match but that single loss cost me the tournament.
I met Alex once a few weeks before his lifetime ban. The game store he was at when he got his lifetime ban is about 20 minutes from the place I used to play magic at a few years ago. I was getting into modern and asked a friend to borrow a deck and he said his friend had one available. I showed up and was handed modern humans by Alex. Didn't even know he was notable until when he got banned and I found out who he was lol.
Actually I know the store he played at it (not sanctioned event) and he was an extremely friendly guy setting up various cubes to play. However, think his "angle shooting" would actually serve him well at poker.
As a follow up to the Alex discussion, how interesting do you think a video about the worst *negative* cases of sloppy play in mtg history would be? Near the top of the list would have to be the guy (who's name I sadly forget right now) who lost a tournament because he had two cards in hand and entered combat before using the discard ability of his Hazoret and wasn't able to attack with them.
There's always the classic "Do you have any fast effects?" Although arguably it's less sloppy play and more angle shooting, but still a classic fuckup.
I recall a match from the RTR/Theros standard era where- if I recall correctly the match was Maze's End V. Mono-Black Devotion and the Gates player cast Merciless Eviction and named the wrong mode by accident. Despite the fact that both players knew what they had meant to say (I believe he named Creatures when they needed to name Enchantments because Erebos wasn't a creature at the time of cast)- they had said the words and made the mistake and that mistake cost them the match. Gates had taken game 1 and I think that was game 2 which they lost directly to that mistake and Devotion took game 3.
I was playing a janky orzhov life gain deck at magicfest denver. You know, Esper Hero and Simic Nexus Standard? Game one, turn three against Esper Hero, I have two Plains and a Field of Ruin. Crack the Field, blow up their Watery Grave, search my library for a basic Swamp. Then search again. Then search a third time and realize I'm so light on black spells that I'm not even playing a single basic Swamp. Can't cast the Duress in my hand to take their 3feri, find a Plains and cast Healer's Hawk, and 0-3 drop from the event less than an hour later : D There's sloppy play and then oh boy there's sloppy deckbuilding
@@jayharyu927 That's my biggest fear if I ever did go to a tournament. Me being my own worst enemy. To be fair if you at least had a couple cards that give you mana of any type you name it would've worked. Even if I dont run the basic land type of a certain card I need in my deck I ALWAYS make sure to include at least a couple of those creature, mana, or sorcery cards to give me the mana required for its devotion cost. Mana Pyramid is a good one and since it's an artifact that can tutor you it fits in with any theme if you imagine your character having a pyramid hovering around them like a boss! That's how I build my decks at least, I'm on the battlefield in every duel, and my character is one awesome lighting and illusion Mage.
I tried to jump right into this video to just get a view of an entirely foreign community I know nothing about to see if I could understand it. And No. I cannot understand a word of it. I don’t understand what’s happening at all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The video is still pretty interesting even as an outsider who can’t even understand it. Good job!
I lost game 3 during a legacy gp in April of 2018 to Bertoncini by "somehow" drawing all four copies of chalice of the void in my first three draw steps on a mull to 5 (first copy was in my opening hand). If it was anyone else, I'd have written it off as bad variance, but his little Facebook statement a couple months later put a pretty bad taste in my mouth that's still there years later.
What I’ve learned from this video is whenever I’m playing a card game where my cards/deck are allowed to be in my opponent’s possession before I conduct any form of draw I need to make sure they shuffle cards facing down or blindfolded…😅
Back in 2003 I played in a Grand Prix and was doing well enough that I was poised to make day 2 if I wun my last round, no idea what my opponent needed, but at 1-1 and 15 minutes left on the clock I was well ahead in the game and looked to finish him in a couple turns, he started stalling hard, after a few minute I eventually realised what he was doing and told him to play faster, he was Italian or something so he further stalled by pretending not to understand me (I had previously talked to him just fine in English). Luckily although younger than my opponent and a bit flabergasted that he seemed to be trying to cheat me, I called a judge, quickly explained the situation, but my opponent tried stalling even more with the judge proclaiming his innocence in far too many words, the judge cut him off and asked for play to continue watching over us, I did my obvious plays quickly and when my opponent again got his turn and had to show his hand to the judge he had nothing that could possible alter the game and started stalling again, the judge gave him a warning that if he didnt make a play he would get a game loss. The guy finally conceded a game that had been over for 10 minutes, snarling and muttering in italian at me and the judge before making his exit, I shared a smile with the judge and he just shaked his head, saying, im paraphrasing "Sadly cheats like these are very common and we cant catch everyone doing it". Oh btw this was a limited grand prix and day 2 went horrible in the draft and I was quickly eliminated.
Ya know, in these really big tournament matches, the ones where its top 8ing or similar... Why did they never implement a 3rd party shuffling the decks when it is called for? They already have a judge watching. I guess cheating isn't *that* common but it also doesn't seem like a huge ask to have an outside influence touch the decks to shuffle in important matches
You can request a judge shuffle the deck. A seasoned opponent of Humphries' (I forget his name) did exactly that after he suspected him in the same tournament that Humphries won
You are allowed to cut your deck ONCE after your opponent shuffled it when presented to cut. ONLY if they shuffled it. This better prevents both parties from stacking decks. I know this doesn't answer your questions, but it does show some initiative to make pregame actions more fair to all players and prevent cheating by stacking decks.
I played at a store with, usually 8-12 people in 1996-98. There as a guy that kept cheating, then this ultra-awkward dude clocked him in the face when he caught him cheating. That was, of course, a poor choice.
I was playing in a $1000 dollar money tournament. My first round opponent dropped a 20 sided die as he sat down. It came up an 18 and he pointed at me and said, "your roll to see who goes first". I called a judge right away as I knew I was dealing with a cheater. I asked him, it if had come up a 1 would you have told me to roll or just went on with sitting down and arranging your stuff. Judge gave him a game loss for it. Then when we got around to playing our first actual game I saw him draw an extra card on his 2nd turn. I called the very same judge over and told him it was his turn 2 and to count his cards. He did in fact have an extra card. Instant match loss and dude went ballistic. I can't stand cheaters!!
Did he smell
@@tedcomet3121 I mean, I can smell something tangy and musty just from reading that post so probably.
"dude went ballistic" if he got so angry about it, he should have done a better job at cheating tbh xD
epic.
How did he cheat by rolling an 18?
Shout out to that judge who was ok with digging through trash just to catch a cheater.
I mean that's the best part, you can just get the guy you're questioning to do it.
He prob did it because he knew (or had a feeling) he had been cheating for a while but couldn’t prove it, and saw his chance hahaha
Yeah, that was when they actually got paid, lmao. 😂
Can't get one past him
@@markcross2445agreed. Judges had nemesis too.
You could tell the last guy was cheating because when the camera man asked “what turn is it?” Instead of just answering him he straight up says “2 explorers” which to me would indicate that he had his answer ready to go if anyone called him out on cheating, even if they weren’t calling him out on cheating yet…
Imagine doing something shady, then asking your opponent to do something shady, then calling a ref because your opponent did something shady.
Yeah, that's such a crazy cheat that it had to make the list. I can't believe anyone would even try that, or expect to get away with it if the did.
Mana weaving is explicitly legal. C'mon Richard, I'd expect more from an old school player.
Reminds me of a game of chess where a player called Inarkiev made an illegal move, then Magnus Carlsen moved in response, and any move at that point is considered illegal, and that guy called the arbiter and won the game on DQ. The result was later annulled and the win given to Carlsen
Another common one was deliberately skipping a draw, then calling the judge to get your opponent a game loss for drawing an extra card, and when the judge does a count they are up a card
There was a Chess game that was lost that way, the person who made the second illegal move was the one penalized
"What turn is it?"
"Two explores"
No mention of lands, no "hey you've got too many lands," just asking what turn it is, and Alex immediately tries to cover his cheat
Isn't it against rules for outside spectators to comment on a game?
@@richfatman259 It’s against the rules to provide or request outside assistance. I’m not really sure if it is outside assistance, but here we are.
@@richfatman259 they’re supposed to ask both players to pause the game and call a judge. How many times did someone catch him do 2 explores and then he just puts a land back in his hand when no judge was around?
if he weren't cheating and had 5 lands he'd give the same response. It's not admission of cheating, most decks don't put lands out that quickly.
@@aqxbjc5879 If you did your order correctly and played only as many cards as you were allowed to, and thus have nothing to hide, you'd answer the question straight up. You wouldn't need to explain your actions until prompted further, because you would know what you did was a legit move that doesn't need justification.
Dancing around the question is a good way to dodge the truth and immediately pegs you as suspicious. When someone asks you a question and you don't give a straightforward answer, it means you either don't know the answer (not the case here), or you've got something to hide (exactly the case here).
The main thing I learned from this is that all professional Magic players can also do magic tricks with cards
Lolol
It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy that some amateur Chris Angel is gonna try to cheat with sleight of hand card tricks in a card game called magic.
As someone who is very talented at sleight of hand pulling it off with sleeved cards is impressive
Someone who's good at card tricks can shuffle cards from the bottom to the top and vice versa.
So instead of hovering the cards at the top, they could have shuffled them down and back up again, easily obfuscating the hover. This would also give them the option to set up worse hands for their opponents by checking the bottom and shuffling up more bad cards.
I've dabbled in card tricks and seeing this kind of lazy cheating made me cringe. It also makes me assume there's a lot of people better at it that aren't getting caught.
😂
In 1994 my roommate invited Mike Long and another player who was in his playtesting crew to play at our apartment. I was a budget player at that time and he refused to play a game if his opponents didn't put up an ante so we never played head to head. His cards were curved because he used a bridge shuffle and when he turned them he didn't actually turn them he just started them spinning; At one point, when he was playing against my friend, he tapped a land by starting it spinning and when it stopped it looked like he hadn't tapped it. He tried to tap it a second time, my friend called him out for it and Mike's friend told me that he'd once seen Mike tap the same land three times in a turn.
Man, I'm so glad they wised up and got rid of ante.
Of course the cheater wouldn't want to play unless they were getting something out of it.
a real mechanic
I have no idea how this game works, and I'm unsure why the YT algorithm brought me here, but I'm somehow invested. Can you give me a quick explanation of the tapping mechanic/rule of this game?
@@ThRoWBaCkTeXaS Some cards can only be used once per turn. To indicate that they've been used you're supposed to turn them 90 degrees. At the start of your next turn you're allowed to turn them back to normal.
I like how a "four year sentence" is ridiculous for misconduct that took place in a trivial card game, even though that sentence is just a ban from that trivial card game
I love self victimisation to insane degrees. Like comparing himself to serious criminals, buddy no is calling for you to go to jail you just can't play this card game professionally.
How else cheater cope
I had to read this again and I first thought "wait a minute, he actually did go to jail or what?"... because a 4 year sentence is 4 years in jail and nothing else. So... that one guy is quite crazy to use the term "sentence" when it is nothing more than a game ban from a card game like Magic. Okay, if you are a pro player and you have only that to generate income then it is quite devastating. But maybe you should have a backup plan and study something more than only card game playing.
"DARVO is an acronym for 'deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender'. It refers to a reaction that alleged perpetrators of wrongdoing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior."
As you can see, HE was the real victim, and you keyboard cagefighters are under attack.
It's just a card game and yet he was willing to knowingly cheat the rules of said card game. If you cheat, then you deserve the consequences.
Best part about the Trevor guy’s outburst is how it undermines itself at every turn. Saying it’s just a card game and comparing it to murder, when your only punishment was that you temporarily can’t play that very game competitively… seems exactly relevant and proportional lol
Well, I guess he was making reference about all the hate he received after being caught
But being a public personality being exposed as a fraud......
Good old Mike Long. I would have had an invite spot a bajillion lifetimes ago, but his cheating and leveraging his name to the judge meant he got the win because he drew 5 extra cards. The judge after 20 minutes of talking to Long decided there was simply no way to be able to count how many cards each player should have by that turn in the game, which is absolute non-sense on turn 12 or so. Of course you can figure out the number of cards and Mike had 5 too many.
He was trying his be annoying and rush the game when he was loosing. He would then keep trying to rush the end of my turn to his draw phase, so he'd go ahead and cup his hand over his deck like he was ready to draw and keep running his thumb across the back edge/corner of the cards to be able to pull two but make it look like 1. He tried to be loud and boisterous because there was a crowd watching and also acting like I was simply just taking too much time, although I was perfectly within my allotted time per phase/turn.
It was really easy for me to notice the extra cards he ended up with because Hymn to Tourach and Hypnotic Spector do pretty specific things to your hand size, so it didn't take a genius to see what was happening since I was playing discard against him and had wrecked his hand in the first 2 turns of game 3. This made me question how he pulled off game 2 against me as well, but I was too focused on me and my play and didn't pay attention until things shifted so much during game 3.
I ended up hearing it was actually that judge and the shop owner that got him to come to that qualifier in the first place and paid for his travel/expenses, but who can say.
At least there aren't videos all over the internet of me acting like an unsportsmanlike d*ck and coming in #2 on MTGGoldfish's cheaters list.
I guess I am a tiny bit salty because back then as a teenager I was trying so hard to qualify, driving insane distances, having to hustle ever local tournament, draft, and sealed within 100 miles 4 or 5 days a week like a job to earn enough cards to sell to fund these out of town qualifier attempts. I pretty much gave up after that because I didn't see a use when someone could so blatantly cheat and but get handed the win because he was a "known" player.
So there is my sad Mike Long story.
Just glad he got caught and his pro player name now means crap
That sucks. I hate that it happened, especially after all the work you put in, and it’s really terrible that he leveraged his position as this great pro player to beat you unfairly. It makes me feel lucky that I never went through this at any level of competitive play I’ve taken part in. I hope you find some solace in that he got caught and that his name was tarnished.
I started playin in 94 and was hitting ptqs as a 12ish year old and was really good for a kid. Even won a JSS. I feel I was cheated a lot tho at ptqs since I was young and naive. I even caught a guy at ptq straight rip an extra card, judge did nothing since it I think they were friends.
Long story short:
That's horrible man...
Mike Long actually taught me to play mtg. He was a super nice and generous guy .... until you played against him and he was ruthless and bent any rule he could to win even just a casual match.
what a douche
I just downloaded that amulet bloom deck and I gonna get it printed at MPC into plastic cards :3
That adds up with what Rosewater said about it being a persona, he was like a wwe heel
Once had regular EDH play group at a hobby store. (12 regulars)
This one dude always had the best luck when it came to drawing what he needed. Real “Heart of the cards” stuff.
One day, I was using a mill deck and targeting him hard.
Someone did the math on his graveyard and accused him of having more than 100 cards.
Turns out that the bastard always played with a dozen extra cards in his pocket or on his lap.
How we never noticed is beyond me!
Never showed his face at the store again.
Don’t forget commander is a casual format
Genuinely baffled at how badly you must hate yourself to need so terribly to feel good about yourself that you cheat in the lowest stakes possible, casual commander lmfao, what a loser
@blazestudios23 my dude people are cheating in all sorts of casuals games and sports everyday everywhere. It's because they are weak and totally dependant on winning
This is true, at work on our breaks we play dice games for Fun. One employee straight up been cheating just to brag about it. @brucewillis542
@blazestudios23 there’s a difference between knowingly breaking the rules or not
Anyone else remember that Dredge player who cracked a fetch for Stomping Ground, realised he'd milled all his copies and just scooped one of them out of the GY in order to "find" it while searching his deck?
Blew my mind how jaw-droppingly obvious it was, like he had forgotten the match was on camera or something
Dan Lanthier. He tried to claim that he had 3 Stomping Grounds and 2 Arid Mesas and that he was trying to correct a game state.
He got caught cheating at my LGS for that. It was absolutely rediculous and everyone who played locally at the time followed it very closely. It was super disappointing
Dan Lanthier was one of the most antagonistic pos I've ever encountered n tournaments back when I played locally. He was always telling others off, always trying to pull a quick one of people, calling judges for no reason other than try to fish for a game loss for his opponent.
Bertoncini was my first opponent at my first ever PTQ way back in the day. And to this day I’m sure he cheated his mana count off his 2 Lotus Cobras to resolve both Avenger of Zendikar and Time Warp in one turn to stop me from winning 2-1. Couldn’t prove it so I let it go, but it was nice to feel vindicated once the “2 explores” thing happened a few years later.
Where the fuck were you while he was doing it.
I read your story over on Pleasantkenobis channel just the other day! What a shitter thing to do man. I'm sorry you got matched up with a buttolug of a player.
@@christophermccullough9986 thanks. Lol funny yeah I did post it on both, they both dropped this video and I couldn’t resist lol. Bertoncini also used to come around my LGS for about 6 months or so, and right after he won that star city games sealed 10K he was arrogantly betting people they couldn’t build his sealed deck out of his pool (he didn’t show people what anyone came up with just said right or wrong and how far off). No one was even close. Then I went, I built his deck card for card without knowing it, bar only two cards, which he admitted were the two cards he was super on the fence about building it. I think he gave me a pack or something, I don’t remember. But he looked super annoyed, and he stopped doing it after that, which is the part worth remembering for me XD
The fact that he was last seen trying to scam-sell bogus NFTs is the perfect epilogue to his sad dishonorable tale. I'm sorry he cheated you at that game store long ago, but be at peace knowing that his path came to a dead-end.
@@bluesuncompanyman lol, I happen to know he does poker these days. When he was an LGS local I added him on FB and just never deleted or interacted with him. Most of his time is spent posting pictures of poker tournaments he claims to be winning lots of money at (probably cheating there too if so) and mild to moderately offensive memes.
I was the reanimator player mentioned at 22:48, pretty sure my claim to fame in mtg lore is being the first person with documented evidence of Alex cheating. The reason theres no footage because this was a text-only feature match.
Firstly, I was friends with GerryT at the time and on day 1 we put together a reanimator list for legacy day 2, which was how Alex knew what I was playing. IIRC, he had played a Sower main deck at a previous but recent SCG so he had plausible deniability. He cast a sower to steal my reanimated platinum angel to kill me while i was at negative life.
He was caught by me one week later, when i pulled up his 2nd place merfolk list to build for a legacy local, and stared in disbelief.
I contacted the SCG TO, and after a couple weeks of discussion with them they basically said they talked to him and he said it was a mistake and they believed him. And lets be real, they wanted to believe him, he was their star. It would have been a scandal.
I beat him a couple years later in a ptq quarterfinal, and I watched him like a hawk but the matchup was so lopsided in my favor that it didnt matter. And I won the ptq which was dope.
My favorite example of Jared Boettcher cheating is the game against Thomas Ross you showed clips from, because he was so focused on cheating he actually gave Thomas the land he NEEDED to beat him the next turn, and he was obviously mana screwed up to that point.
Lol yea great match
Well the cheating can get only get you so far, there is not a lot that can help you against Tom :D
Jared was an idiot from my local MTG community and I think what was exceptionally frustrating was watching people herald him. I’ve even heard the people who taught him the cheat are the ones that helped call him out for it later. I also think this video as a whole is pathetic. Really shows the state of modern magic if we have to make a video about the trash from the past.
@@zach518 that last sentence seems really antagonistic fam, it's just a history of magic video.
@@deatheater9007 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ look at the view count of this video compared to ever single other video MTGgoldfish has uploaded on here in the last month. This is the one with most views. Not trying to be antagonistic just calling it how I see it.
Lessons from this video:
-Always SHUFFLE your opponent's deck in a Magic match with stakes, don't just cut. If they don't present, ask to shuffle. If they repeatedly fail to present, call a judge.
-Pay attention to the little lapses in attention that favor your opponent. True sloppy play will favor the opponent in my experience certainly less than half the time but maybe somewhere between 20-25% of the time. Cheated "sloppy" play is calculated never to give up an edge.
-Pay attention to the nagging feeling of doubt that you can't put a finger on. Trust your instincts and don't let seemingly innocent breaches of the rules pass without a judge call. Warnings are important for judges to dish out because they allow habitual cheaters to be sniffed out more easily.
TL;DR Call a judge, pay attention, trust your instincts, CALL A JUDGE
best lesson from this video tournaments over a certain size have some odd edge case tension where ppl who aren't cheating are dq'd and people who are are fine. all for prizes that arent' worth the time investment for anyone over 30 complied with software from the 90's. I like magic but sort of hate tournemnt mtg.
@@nickrichie517 Good thing colluding cliques get Damned to Hell to be raped for Eternity.
Haha
Also, call a judge on yourself if you make an honest mistake. Yeah, sometimes you accidentally play an extra land, draw an extra card, forget to de-sideboard, miss a mandatory trigger, etc. When this happens, you need to call judge and be ready to accept a potential game loss. What you don't want is a lifetime ban because "accidentally cheating" and failing to fess up to that accident is the same as deliberately cheating.
Cutting is easier
Cringiest comment I've ever read
At my first local tournament way back when Ixalan was about to come out, I played vs someone who, without any possible reason, was just looking at the top cards of their deck when they thought I wasn't looking. I think it was because they were playing red deck wins and needed to know if they could get lethal or not before I could combo. Called a judge and unfortunately he didn't do anything because he didn't see it and said it didn't matter. He and the cheater obviously knew each other. I later played against that judge in an FNM at a different shop. He didn't remember me. When I won our draft match up, he got mad that I was thinking on my turns and lost it when he finally lost the game. Really nasty and angry guy. Looking back, I think he did know his friend cheated but chose to do nothing because he didn't care about fairness and I wasn't going to top 8 anyway.
I feel for Tom Ross as he was used in this video several times as he played against what is the top tier list of cheaters.
poor tom ross. legit one of my fav mtg players ever
he was one of my favorite players to ever play against. @@luna6315
fabrizio Anteris mindset comes down to a sense of entitlement that makes me shiver. in his mind, he DESERVED to beat those 'lesser' players so he could have a shot to play against the better players, he wanted to play with good players and didnt feel he actually needed to earn it or prove himself so he simply cheated to sweep the lesser players out of his way and not risk losing to them. his wins were something he deserved, not something to be earned.
That mindset is THE reason why skill is not a defense against accusations of cheating. It's a remarkably common problem in other competitive hobbies like speedrunning, where top players still sometimes cheat because they feel they are owed results.
There's a big cheating scandal in chess right now and the kid who is accused of doing it, over the board, said that he did cheat in the past (online) for this exact reason: He wanted to play better players. And I hear so many voices that say they understand that reason. And I really don't get it. If you want to play better players... PLAY BETTER. There's really no other way.
How can one be so entitled to do this stuff?
I would hate myself.
@@KyussTheWalkingWorm How do they not see such a blatant logical error? If they're really good enough to play with the best, then why would they need to cheat to ensure they play with the best? Sure you can get dealt a bad hand and lose because of that, but that can happen just as easily against the better players too. Such a bizarre sense of entitlement.
@@whoistheoctopus970 So do these guys that cheat in order to play better players NOT cheat once they are facing off against said better player?
@@scorpiusbalthazar4327 They _absolutely_ cheat when they play the better players, as long as they think they can get away with it (and sometimes even when they don't). Because inevitably they either realise that they simply don't have the skills to beat these 'better players' _unless_ they cheat, or they convince themselves that they _deserve_ to win and cheat out of hubris or instinct.
It's really stressful not only thinking about your plays but constantly having to watch what your opponent is doing with his deck. That's why I left the competitive circuit because cheaters are more common than they seem.
I play yugioh tournaments all the time as a kid, and if you weren’t cheating, you weren’t trying lol
I was playing at Brothers Grimm when Humphries got caught cheating. The next week at draft everyone was awkward. At the time I didn’t know what happened and someone told me. A friend of mine who played against him told me he was an intimidating jerk. And then I looked it up and saw his response and how his cards were up for sale. I loved it.
I also played at Grimm for a while, and Humphries had also gotten his ass kicked and his face broken when he called a POC the n-word, then repeated it again when the other guy got angry and threw a chair at him.
@@DerangedHermitBeautiful. A broken nose seems like a fair punishment for using the n-word.
@@DustinRobbins-iz9hi So physical violence is okay for using words? Wild take. That sort of mindset has no place in a civilized society, it's fascist behavior.
@@DerangedHermit "POC" huh? Weird, almost sounds like something a racist white person would say back during Jim Crowe. My how times have changed.
All of this shuffle cheating could be solved by forcing an aproximate 50/50 cut before the deck is returned to the player. Also, watching some one vigorously shuffle your 2,500 dollar modern deck like that would drive me insane.
It would me too. But they have so many copies of said cards it doesn’t bother them. That or they have been playing so long they just no longer care. It’s their career and they will get more cards as sets come out. They will always have cards to throw around.
It's possible to shuffle your opponents deck in a way that does basically no damage (no riffling). Most people that play Magic competitively today know how to do that. Of course it was different in the old days though.
I don’t understand why don’t they cut their own deck in half after the opponent shuffles the said deck ? That too card cheat would be gone
Bro, seeing him bridge shuffle his opponent's deck at 3:50 makes me angry.
100% of it could be solved (plus the retard 2.5k cardboard) by moving it all online get with the times
I still can't get over the Stephen Speck one; dude was a close friend in college when this happened, looked up to him and everything. Then this happened. Haven't talked to him in years now, he really vanished.
I was about to ask, dude vanished off the net too. If you find anything about him lmk cuz I'm curious where he vanished off to
Only cheater i caught that never came back was a dude who tried to draw 4 on a 2 card draw spell. When he got in my face about it, i called a judged and he left before the judge could arrive at our table. When i explained to the judge, the judge agreed i was in the right and the guy had been a known problem in the circuit but was a close friend to event organizers.
Good video, but it's a shame there was no mention of Chris pikula. Chris pikula is an early pro tour legend who basically forfeited his rightful spot in the pro tour hall of Fame for his crusade against cheating. In a video about cheating I feel like it's worth an honorable mention to talk about pikulas commitment to fairplay.
Pikula is a hero. I just bought two near mint Planeshift Meddling Mages that cost about 5x as much as the cheapest option because that man has to be honored.
Can you elaborate a little more. Why did his crusade against cheating lead to him losing his spot in the Hall of fame?
@@mathewhaight Because pros who cheated also had votes. I believe he missed by a single vote.
@@sjake8308 That's disgusting.
@@mathewhaight What happened?
I thought this was a parody by the voice at the start
☠
Jason Gordon should have been in that list somewhere as most of the 90's cheaters wouldn't have been doing what they did without him. His father was a lawyer who threatened to sue WOTC when he was caught cheating. He forced a whole handful of rules to get changed in the early days of competitive MTG
I'm going to have to look into Jason Gordon, that's a name I'm not familiar with.
@@MTGGoldfish He was from Connecticut. He played at a lot of the early Gray Matter tournaments that Glen and BDM put on in the mid 90's. His antics were mostly at early years of the pro tours that he got DQ'd at. I was a judge in CT running large tournaments back then and had to constantly deal with his nonsense as a judge and also as a player. He was really where the term "rules lawyering" came from.
I think (99% that was his name) that's who cheated me in the Albany limited PTQ finals (after I'd just beat David Price to advance). He played a card from his graveyard. I caught the cheat immediately by inspecting his graveyard and seeing the card he'd played earlier was no longer there. He was well known to literally everyone as a cheater. But judging was so basic back then they weren't even really paying attention to the match much lol. Luckily I got support from onlookers, so even though we both got warnings (which still irks me), his illegal game action was denied and I won in the end.
There's one guy at my local shop that will try and tell me I'm playing wrong if he's at disadvantage. I've flashed their attacking creature during combat, and I've attacked with my 3/3, they swing in with their 4/4, and I cast a +2/+2 on my creature. They tell me that's not how the game works. Well isn't that how instants work?!
You can plan the instant in response to them declaring the atttack creature, or after you declare your defending creature before damage goes through.
Would love to see this video done for Pokemon cheaters. So many big names come to mind. Xiao Xiao Long, Jimmy Pendarvis, Rahul Reddy, Cal Conner, Gino Lombardi, etc. Would be a great video
That awkward moment when you see one of your favorite poker dealers on a list of the 10 most infamous Magic cheaters for stacking his deck....
Which one?
#9
Never trust a dealer with a mechanic's grip
Whats wild that i know the man too XD
Who tf has a favorite card dealer 🤣
Of course the biggest cheater was selling NFT’s lol
Yeah, at least I learned something more. Wants to cheat some people out of money in other ways now since he can't do it in MTG. Bertoncheaty such a scumbag. Outside of matches I'm pretty convinced that him being super nice to people was just to cover up his cheating and have defenders willing to talk him up.
I gather Mike Long graduated from MTG to an internet search optimisation scam.
Note how the people stacking their opponents' decks are always engaged in talk with people, adding distraction to the mix.
You neglected to also mention that Saito was removed from his position at Hareruya earlier this year after getting arrested and indicted for illegal gambling (poker, though there's no indication of cheating there).
I missed that part of the story (although as an American where poker is sort of illegal but wildly accepted that whole situation is really weird to me now that I read up on it, it must be cultural differences().
being an American where gambling is a accepted part of our culture it is weird seeing someone getting arrested for gambling
That's so bizarre honestly, there are so many things that constitute gambling in Japan that are legal there, yet poker isn't?
@@dark_rit they do loopholes such as winning tickets that you can redeem at another location for money or the prize. You know gambling but by the rules it is not considered gambling
@@MTGGoldfish if he's hosting poker nights at a game store he works at tho, that would be clearly illegal in the US as well as Japan. There's leeway for friendly gambling, but doing it as part of a business is a no no in practically every US state.
I tried competitive play back in the late 90's. I quickly realized that not only were probably 1/3rd of players cheaters, but hobby shops enabled it. See, if you were a regular customer of XYZ shop and spent a lot of money there monthly, they'd overlook your cheating to avoid losing you as a customer. I played in probably 20-30 tournaments(in my home state of Kentucky and in Michigan where my cousins lived and I regularly visited) and I don't think I ever saw a legit winner a single time. One store in Michigan even straight up told me and my cousin that "their guy" spends hundreds a month there and could do whatever he wanted, openly in front of a score of other players. That was one of the last tourney's I played and I've not looked back at competitive MtG since.
Sure bro :D
I'm calling bs
…Norman?
Sounds like a capitalism problem
Sounds like you just werent very good at it tbh
The judge blinks right around 14:29. Great video!
Yeah, the mistakes always being in the favour of the player is a pretty big signpost. I have some friends that play Warhammer, and whenever there's a new edition, a rules update, or just something that doesn't come up too often, one player in particular always seems to understand the rule in such a way that it maximises the benefit to him. Not necessarily cheating in that case, but a willingness to not dig deeper and just accept the first answer that's good for him.
40k is full of cheaters that do that very thing. With confusing as hades rules strung out between the codex's, supplemental books, and the rulebook. Then you have the FAQ for the rules and each codex. It would take a librarian to keep up with all the factions
@@joshual6305 Good thing every Chapter has one (Librarian)... ;)
The other hard part about 40k is eventually, if you've been playing long enough, editions start blurring together. Yeah, it's a bit suspicious if someone seems to always benefit from forgotten rules, but it's also understandable they miss the fine print in the FAQ of a White Dwarf that nerfed something that was unchanged for over a decade.
@@nekrataali isnt there like, a comprehensive rules guide? I dont play the table top, but that situation sounds like a judge could just google whats correct?
10 most infamous cheaters that got caught…
Ha, that's true. I guess it's likely that the best cheaters are the ones who have gotten away with it.
This isn't a list of best cheaters, but infamous ones. And a part of being infamous is for it to be known.
That first one reminds me of the Super Smash Bros player who unplugged his controller mid match, and his opponent paused the game as a courtesy. He then called for a PENALTY to the opponent since pausing is against the rules (technically true). Thankfully the judges shut him down and told him to just play.
Damn, this recap really makes you appreciate just how easy it is to rig the outcomes of tournaments, especially when such high-status people defend and protect cheaters from punishment.
You're making me think of like an Oceans Eleven type scheme...😮
Cool video. I knew most of them, but seeing it in this condesed form blew me away.
Also, what I took away from this: holy moly, Magic was on MTV in the 90s??
crazy how in Magic u can play illegally and just pass it off as "just playing sloppy",
in yugioh even a slight illegal move would be an automatic loss if not a repairable game state...
There was a player known for cheating, at a Sydney GP, that intentionally played a card wrong. It was pointed out to him a few times that he was playing it wrong and he accepted it, but lots of players didn't realize. The same judge never saw him do it twice in the tournament. We pieced it together afterwards, but didn't have a paper trail.
Man, Wantanabe cheated? And got removed from the Hall of Fame? That's heartbreaking, I watched him back in so many pro tour finals..
He was always one of my favorites too.
He didn't cheat. He was proven innocent.
@@actualjessielive783 yes he did.
@@actualjessielive783 I haven’t seen or heard anything to prove it wasn’t cheating since the incident happened.
@@actualjessielive783 Wantanabe is that you?
as a new player this is a very helpful video. i now know i need to keep an eye on my opponent's moves. i haven't been directly exposed to cheating but i have played against a player who rushed my turns and tried to get me to fold when he had a big board state. while not necessarily cheating, it is an annoying and distracting tactic that tries to take my head out of the game and disrupt my focus. i would call it unfair sportsmanship
Here's a bit more info about Alex getting banned for the last time. He was playing in a smaller event in upstate NY, and he tried to take a Hardened Scaled off of an Ancient Stirrings in modern. He got called out and judges reported him to WOTC.
I started in '94 and I think the idea of mana weaving not being bad just came fron the fact that winning because an opponent got too much/too little land just wasn't fun and didn't really show how well your deck was designed or your skill level. Before they intstituted the mulligan rule, it wasn't uncommon at local tourneys I played in to see players allow their opponent to reshuffle and draw a full hand if they showed a starting hand with only one or no land or nonland cards. Also, land destruction decks were quite common back in the day and starting off low on land against one meant you were pretty much done so that probably played a role in how weaving was seen at the time as well.
The no land/all land mulligan was actually the first official mulligan.DCI made it official in 1994. Before then, there just wasn't any mulligans at all.
The Mark Justice thing is a little more complicated than him just cheating, he came from a Mormon family and he cut ties with most of them because they disapproved of Magic. In his newfound freedom and fame, he started getting into drugs and would even go to tournaments tripping on acid or high on cocaine. He became unhappy with his new life, and he has said since then that the muscle sliver incident was him hoping to get caught so that he could be forced to stop, a little self-sabotage in that way. I highly suggest reading Generation Decks by Titus Chalk, it's a history of MTG that talks a lot about Mark Justice's story.
Perhaps I judge too harshly, but I never buy the whole "I wanted to be caught" line. It's just something people say to express remorse when in fact they were sloppy and would continue cheating if they could.
I mean yea that is a little tragic... But no one forced him to cheat... He chose to that rather than quit.
That doesn't matter. Don't cheat.
I think I must have missed something in the video but can you explain why buying a Muscle Sliver from a vendor was "cheating?" Was it a counterfeit or what?
@@adamj93 It's been a minute since I watched the video but if I recall correctly they were working off a draft event where you are limited to the cards drawn at the start of the event. I may be mistaken though, been a while.
The Yuuya cheat hurt, he was one of my favorite pros at the time.
Me too :(
He didn't even cheat, he was proven innocent lol.
@S V Literally yes, there is a video defending him from someone at the pro tour I think it was a judge, his sleeves were checked before round 15 and after it they were fine, then he was intentionally drawing already in the top 8 and they were marked? It makes no sense why he would mark them AFTER he had gotten top 8 why wouldn't he cheat the round he needed to win to get in top 8?
@@actualjessielive783 nope
@@jefff3023 Yep
Shoutout to that guys strong shirt buttons. Saving humanity from the horrors 😂 2:23
I didn't see this at first. Thanks for the laugh lmfao
Magic cheating has nothing on Chess cheating, 0 vibrating remote plugs to be found.
Not yet....
"Found" being the key word in that comment.
If you’re looking for a vibrating plug try your momma’s sock drawer.
Some of the old banned player list would be pretty entertaining. Instead of vibrators, you'd end up with your deck stolen or an assault.
At the tournament, no. In the hotel rooms after, though...
Loved this style of breakdown with the use of tournament footage that shows the cheating. It’s Super informative as someone who always heard about how these players had cheated, but never saw any of the images or footage that showed it. It gives me a better idea of what to look for when playing in person.
As an aside, I like that you can shuffle an opponent’s deck and your opponent can shuffle your deck, but I would also like there to be a rule that allowed you to cut your own deck when your opponent hands it back after they shuffled it in order to reduce an opponent’s ability to stack your top cards. To be clear I’d only like such a rule to allow for you to cut your deck (not shuffle a 2nd time) and you’d be allowed to do this cut ONLY IF your opponent shuffled your deck.
That used to be allowed but Wizards didn't want the deck's owner to be the last person to touch it during shuffling because reasons.
That's really good.
I am convinced this video was narrated by a cartoon dog.
WTF
yep. That's how this guy sounds. It's extremely irritating.
I could fill a room of friends who'd sound like jetix fox narrators
I think you meant endearing. I love seth
Please, he's a cartoon FISH, get your branding right at least!
It would be funny to see a tournament with only these guys in it
an un set tournament
That's very similar to my idea for a steroid Olympics.
@@scorpiusbalthazar4327 1988 Men's 100m final. Seven of the eight runners were caught using PEDs at one time or another. Honestly, that decade was a really sketchy time for athletics.
Extra points for most creative cheats lol. And if you catch your opponents cheat than they skip a draw or something like that :D
Surprisingly Alex is playing pro poker and doing really well at it... can't help but wonder....
He is actually good player. Just because he has cheated doesn't mean all of his success is from it. Don't get me wrong he is a douche anyways
define very well
To be fair, to be a successful Magic cheater, you've got to be good at psychology and head games and Alex was certainly good at those. And those are also the qualities of a successful poker player - even an honest one. So it does check out, but doesn't necessarily mean he's cheating at poker.
It's way harder to cheat at poker if I'm assuming it to be texas hold 'em where you are dealt 2 cards, and have the flop, turn, and river available to everyone and those are controlled by the dealer.
you'd better not try to cheat when playing poker. the high stakes call for far more severe control over players and if you get caught there you don't simply get disqualified but also face criminal law
I was a lvl 2 yugioh Judge. We had a guy who was rich and stole side decks, then because the side decks were only like $250 they couldn't do anything about it. The place had cameras and eventually a person got pissed off and told them that there side deck was $750 worth and had requested a police report and video of the scene. He was arrested 😂
Honestly on par with an actual Yugioh minor villain
Weaving was not only widely accepted in the early days, it was often taught by people to new players as common sense to avoid non-games.
My entire Magic group actually encourages mana weaving, simply because we all just want to have fun in Commander, and unlimited mulligans lol.
@@fellshaw7058 Commander isn't tournament magic where you can be disqualified. I've seen playgroups with house rules that allow a player that missed two early game drops to exchange their draw to tutor a basic.
Yeah, one of the most common complaints is manascrew/flood. Then some people say it's a feature, not a bug. Then you have digital card games and such that don't have manascrew/flood at all where it is much appreciated that they don't have screw/flood.
@@dark_rit I also believe screw/flood is a feature not a bug. I just acknowledge that weaving isn't really that bad because you still get to shuffle the opponent's library.
@@yujiro424 I agree that it's a feature: Well constructed decks with good manabases will generally mulligan less frequently and have better draws. As you rightly say though, any playgroup can play using whatever rules makes the game for fun for them.
Oh my God, the absolute cherry on top at the very end. He has a literal full Bingo card of grifts and scams. That was a masterfully assembled breakdown and it culminates in this completely unexpected and sublime final revelation...! I feel like the critic at the end of Ratatouille. Bravo, Seth! Bravo!
I never got anywhere near a championship but a buddy of mine used to lie to win games.
One example, I built a deck around the Kor damage transfer ability. When he realized he couldn't reliably break it -- not that I was consistently winning, mind you, just that he couldn't go 4-1 against it -- he told me the ability had been errata'd away, it simply didn't exist anymore. When I expressed doubt, he shrugged and told me I was "cheating, but if you wanna play anyway....." As if he was willing to do me the favor of lowering himself to play me after he was the one who lied.
He'd lie about how combat timing worked so you couldn't block his creatures, then lie in the opposite way during your attack so HIS card would work when it shouldn't have, lie about how mulligan worked to make your hand even smaller, anything he thought he could get away with. Never occurred to me until watching this video that he was probably shuffling dirty and palming cards on top of everything else. No wonder he always had Fork and Mox Ruby in his starting hand. I am such an idiot.
Anyway, I started carrying and reading the full "lawyer version" of the rules and up-to-the-minute errata on my decks. When he realized he was going to get called out literally every time, he wouldn't play me anymore. It was a moral victory.
I genuinely blame starcity judges for how many cases of cheaters there are, 9 times outta 10 they are barely watching games and barely know the rules. I watched a standard event and they had to call 4 judges for a simple rule clarification. It is sad to see what is essentially a referee not paying attention to a match.
That's what happens when judge positions aren't paying for the best talent out there.
Honestly I don't respect these judges one bit
@@erickwalter2828 it doesn't help they pretty much just take whoever as a judge, it isn't even that hard of a job. Oh yeah I left out the best part of the 4 judges trying to figure out the rule clarification in the end one of them just googled it and figured it out in like 10 seconds after wasting minutes gathering and discussing. Google does a better job than a starcity judge, great look on one of the biggest mtg companies.
@@WGG-01 maybe for L1 but the L2 exam is notoriously difficult. An L2 understands the rules of magic better than someone who has played during every set release ever.
@@willbrechin9181 wrong
The MTV ad 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Seriously. Trying so hard to make tcg players sound/look like tough guys. Bruh.
I never saw that. That was cringe as hell. XD
@@tomgoodman1965 Maro has a whole podcast talking about that time in the game, where he basically says the brand team hated the actual game itself, so they went out of their way to do everything to sell the game except actually show the card game itself.
I strongly considered punching Bertoncini once. It was right after he'd come back from a suspension in 2013 and I played a Legacy side event he was also in where he treated me like an idiot for not agreeing to a prize split. As a grinder at the time I obviously knew he was an amoral sociopath from being in the tournament scene with him. I got uppaired against an opponent who I could have conceded to for a slightly more favorable split and instead squashed them. He approached me after the match and asked why I didn't concede and I told him that I came to game. He rolled his eyes comically and said "that was dumb." I refrained only because I was serious about the game at the time and didn't want to get a lifetime ban. Now that I no longer play I really wish that I had rearranged his smug face because it absolutely would have been worth it.
I'm there with you brother. I played against Alex once and his friend twice. Both were utter scumbags as soon as you weren't "nice enough" to let them get their way.
I think you need to examine yourself first mate. This is unhinged
This video reminded me that I gotta practice shuffling my deck properly more
I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a standard procedure for exactly how you must shuffle your own deck and cut your opponents. I think the lack of variance in this procedure would eliminate a lot of options for cheating, create awareness for the avenues that someone could cheat, and reduce cheating overall
I think you should be allowed a final, single cut after your deck is presented back you. That way the crap of getting cards pushed or pulled from the top of the deck, (or stuff potentially sent to the bottom) is trivialized.
At Comp REL and higher you just present your deck to your opponent.
Your opponent then confirms that it’s sufficiently randomized by cutting, shuffling or doing nothing to it.
If you fail to do so it could result in a Tournament Error - Insufficient Shuffling penalty.
These upgrade to a Game Loss after the first TE-IS warning.
While this is true, it would also end in a lot of warnings for players who are new to the scene who simply don't know the "standardized procedure" for shuffling
@@Aigis31 perhaps it would, but how is that different than any only rules change that has been introduced throughout the history of magic?
I mean, the current system is basically perfect so long as you watch your opponent to make sure they don't glance at the cards in your deck to stack it. Just allowing a cut isn't going to help anything, it will just make things worse. If a cheater is allowed to cut their deck after it's presented back to them, you're just allowing them to stack their deck. If the opponent is only allowed to cut, that's so easy to take advantage of via any number of methods that magicians can employ.
The fake tan on the guy @12:55 is incredible. The 90s were a hell of a time.
"Alex never made a 'mistake' that didn't go in his favor"
David Williams should have at least an honorable mention, since while he is a very nice person and a wonderful magic player, and an outright celebrity in his own right from poker and other stuff, he was indeed caught cheating at one of the biggest tournaments of the year, Worlds 2001
Weird story, IIRC he was banned 10 years for some damaged accumulated knowledge, just because the cards bend ad his opponents easly happen to cut the deck right on them. But yeah he use the ban to become a great poker player, and aslo turn to play magic too as soon as the ban expire. A very cool guy, and probably an exagerated punishment for him...
I heard of one other instance of him cheating where he had double Koth of the Hammer in a draft deck or something like that, which just wouldn't happen in a draft unless you had insane luck.
Didn’t he do porn too?
@@enricocarlini5363 He was banned basically because they were the only foils in his deck and the fact that they had warped meant they were 'marked cards' (and it was a key card in the deck). I suspect he probably wasn't intentionally cheating, but at the same time it wasn't completely unreasonable for WotC to assume that he was.
All the Guillaumes in the world just casually friends that play mtg? That's sus.
Seeing all the punishments in a row, I kinda would also freak out at being handed a 4 year ban if you off set it to Berticini who got two bans for more with less time.
Excellent content! While I of course love gameplay videos, I would love to see more of this kind of stuff. Maybe "worst interpretations of new spoilers" or "most contentious card bannings".
Fabrizio is the worst on this list in my opinion, calling other players lesser as an explanation as to why your cheating is way more scummy in my opinion, cheating because you know your better then another player and give yourself an unfair advantage, disrespectful to all those players that he knocked out of the tournament
Love this vid, Seth. As someone who has played for awhile but never got into the pro scene it’s cool to learn about the history of the game!
I actually played against Tomoharu Saito at a side event once. I asked about the name Hareruya 晴れる屋, and he said it was not based on Hallelujah, but rather hare = sunny and ya = store.
Is your name based off the character Lowelewolf?
this dude took all of the inflection from Chills and added it to him self
If you are caught intentionally cheating then you should be banned from competitive play for life. These people have demonstrated they lack morals and will continue to cheat because it is worth the advantage they get if the price they pay if they are caught isn't substantial.
There's been a debate about that too. Personally I think people should get a second chance, but then if you get caught cheating again you should probably get lifetime ban.
@@MTGGoldfish I can understand that position and think giving people a second chance can be a good thing but unfortunately the more lenient you are the more honest players that would get screwed over and I rather minimize that as much as possible. Plus I don't have much faith that people that have cheated won't do it again. I am curious what those statistics would look like. Thank you for the reply and the video.
I think allowing them back once is fine depending on the nature of their cheats. Twice, I don't think so because they're just there to try and reap as much profits as they can before lifetime ban.
That's not the end of the Saito story, he was caught gambling recently, a big deal in Japan, and isn't the face of Hareruya anymore.
Wow
Never ceases to amaze me. "Wow guys. I'm not a criminal. I just did the one single most awful thing you can do in a card tournament...and the i got banned from that card tournament for doing that awful thing. Come on guys, unfair."
Remembers me that the first video of paper magic after initial covid was somebody dropping a land after casually moving a Wasteland from their hand to the graveyard, destorying opps land
Lol, I remember that one too.
The classic days of pro-level unsleeved magic content.
The days when it didn't take 10mins to partially shuffle your cards
A time when sleeves were illegal and the really sophisticated cheaters could tell what sets cards came from how they felt.
Something that I've seen from speedrunning is that it's usually the good players that are cheating. They're the ones with the knowledge to actually cheat effectively, and the better you are the more you want to eliminate luck from the equation because "I'm so good, i deserve this win, the deck is just fucking me over"
Wow, I didn't know it was like all of this. I just played for the fun and challenge.
I played against someone a very long time ago in a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament just to see how it went. This kid just kept putting cards down and stared at me. Then got mad. I had to ask what it was that he played and what did it do. He yelled for a judge who told him that he was required to explain the card function since not everyone has every card memorized. He let out this noise and sulked. So here I am, at 21, playing against this teenager who is getting pissy about having to explain a card. He gets more aggressive with every time I ask. Couple this with my defensive deck that was about destroying his hand and deck, not life points, and he started throwing a tantrum. Now people are watching and it's getting worse because they're laughing too. He had played something that made discarded graveyard cards go out of play and it worked against him. Half of his deck was out of the game in about 6 turns. Finally he just yells that he forfeits the whole match because it was boring and he would lost by deck out. It turned out he had been the terror of these tournaments every weekend and had won in the double digits. He was mean-spirited and known to mock the youngest players. Never shook hands before or after a game and was known to end a match in single digit turns. He stormed outside with screaming and cursing about trash players. Never wanted to humiliate anyone but I heard that he never came back after that. The store banned him.
Glad that you note that there are basically two eras of cheating: The early stuff in the '90s (Long, Justice) and then the stuff in the early-to-mid 2010s on the Pro Tour and (especially) SCG circuits where a ton of these guys got busts. The latter group, guys just cheating plainly on camera, is the most infuriating. (Then again, that's when I was playing competitively, and I played against some of those jackasses... so I admit it's a bit personal.)
*I wasn't really aware how much of it was going on in the Long Justice era* though I played at about a dozen Pro Tours & averaged > top 32. No real point in sticking with it back then 'cause no year-long tour spots like golf. Shoulda got into poker much sooner in fact.
Wonder how I would have done if no one was mana-weaving & such. I never did, had to be rather a big disadvantage. OTOH the satisfaction of knowing I beat cheaters w/o cheating is a nice bonus in 2022.
I have to disagree.
When this much gets caught on camera on live coverage, there is omnipresent rampant cheating at all levels.
Frankly i would say if a pro can only perform in paper (and not on MTGO) well... it should be a red flag.
The old bloom titan deck could actually kill on turn 1 with hive mind. T1 you go exile simian spirit guide for 1 mana, play amulet, play a bounce land for 2, play summer bloom, play the bounce land 3 more times to cast hive mind and then cast summoners pact and your opponent loses on their upkeep
My very first local draft tournament, I excitedly confided in my first opponent that I'd reached 8th place on Planeswalkers 2013 leaderboards for xbox, so I was looking forward to doing well in this event. He airily declared preconstructed deck users as noobs (an odd comment to make at a draft). A few turns in, he declares that if I draw before untapping my mana one more time he'll make me take mana burn. I ignored him, but he pushed the subject so aggressively I had to call a judge over to explain to him that there is no mana burn. Forfiet the second game, I went on to place second. Never saw that loser again.
Well you weren't playing by the rules. Untap, upkeep, draw. Ignoring that pattern messes with the game's rhythm and can be confusing. He should have called the judge on you instead of making up random rules about mana burn.
I mean, you should have been given a warning for what you did...
At SCG Boston in 2011 Calosso Fuentes hit 4 flash freeze in games 2 and 3 very quickly against me with little deck manipulation. That loss knocked me out of top 16. A few weeks later he was banned for cheating. Absolutely infuriated me. edit: had typo in his first name.
Ugh, sorry that happened to you.
@@MTGGoldfish thanks for your comment. yeah SCG events around that time were full of cheaters unfortunately.
I was playing in a tournament against this guy, absolutely dominated the first game and he said "Damn, it's over, I lost" and stared me for a couple of seconds.
I thought "oh, okay, let's go for game two", took my deck and started to shuffle. He didn't said anything until I started to shuffle, then he said "oh what? No, I didn't surrender"
I was baffled. I knew what he just did. He inmediately called a judge. I just took the L and went to game 2. Still won the match but that single loss cost me the tournament.
I met Alex once a few weeks before his lifetime ban. The game store he was at when he got his lifetime ban is about 20 minutes from the place I used to play magic at a few years ago. I was getting into modern and asked a friend to borrow a deck and he said his friend had one available. I showed up and was handed modern humans by Alex. Didn't even know he was notable until when he got banned and I found out who he was lol.
Actually I know the store he played at it (not sanctioned event) and he was an extremely friendly guy setting up various cubes to play. However, think his "angle shooting" would actually serve him well at poker.
where was this at i knew him when was Young n mtg first started lol
As a follow up to the Alex discussion, how interesting do you think a video about the worst *negative* cases of sloppy play in mtg history would be?
Near the top of the list would have to be the guy (who's name I sadly forget right now) who lost a tournament because he had two cards in hand and entered combat before using the discard ability of his Hazoret and wasn't able to attack with them.
There's always the classic "Do you have any fast effects?" Although arguably it's less sloppy play and more angle shooting, but still a classic fuckup.
I recall a match from the RTR/Theros standard era where- if I recall correctly the match was Maze's End V. Mono-Black Devotion and the Gates player cast Merciless Eviction and named the wrong mode by accident. Despite the fact that both players knew what they had meant to say (I believe he named Creatures when they needed to name Enchantments because Erebos wasn't a creature at the time of cast)- they had said the words and made the mistake and that mistake cost them the match. Gates had taken game 1 and I think that was game 2 which they lost directly to that mistake and Devotion took game 3.
I recommend you check out of NikachuMTG's channel, he's already done videos on a lot of these situations!
I was playing a janky orzhov life gain deck at magicfest denver. You know, Esper Hero and Simic Nexus Standard? Game one, turn three against Esper Hero, I have two Plains and a Field of Ruin. Crack the Field, blow up their Watery Grave, search my library for a basic Swamp.
Then search again.
Then search a third time and realize I'm so light on black spells that I'm not even playing a single basic Swamp. Can't cast the Duress in my hand to take their 3feri, find a Plains and cast Healer's Hawk, and 0-3 drop from the event less than an hour later : D
There's sloppy play and then oh boy there's sloppy deckbuilding
@@jayharyu927 That's my biggest fear if I ever did go to a tournament. Me being my own worst enemy. To be fair if you at least had a couple cards that give you mana of any type you name it would've worked. Even if I dont run the basic land type of a certain card I need in my deck I ALWAYS make sure to include at least a couple of those creature, mana, or sorcery cards to give me the mana required for its devotion cost. Mana Pyramid is a good one and since it's an artifact that can tutor you it fits in with any theme if you imagine your character having a pyramid hovering around them like a boss! That's how I build my decks at least, I'm on the battlefield in every duel, and my character is one awesome lighting and illusion Mage.
I tried to jump right into this video to just get a view of an entirely foreign community I know nothing about to see if I could understand it.
And No. I cannot understand a word of it. I don’t understand what’s happening at all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The video is still pretty interesting even as an outsider who can’t even understand it. Good job!
that MTV invitational video was hillarious :D
I lost game 3 during a legacy gp in April of 2018 to Bertoncini by "somehow" drawing all four copies of chalice of the void in my first three draw steps on a mull to 5 (first copy was in my opening hand). If it was anyone else, I'd have written it off as bad variance, but his little Facebook statement a couple months later put a pretty bad taste in my mouth that's still there years later.
What I’ve learned from this video is whenever I’m playing a card game where my cards/deck are allowed to be in my opponent’s possession before I conduct any form of draw I need to make sure they shuffle cards facing down or blindfolded…😅
Alex Bertoncini had the last invitational card: Jadelight Ranger.
lmaoo
Making your opponent forget they were on the play is a good way to squeeze an extra land if your a ramp deck
Back in 2003 I played in a Grand Prix and was doing well enough that I was poised to make day 2 if I wun my last round, no idea what my opponent needed, but at 1-1 and 15 minutes left on the clock I was well ahead in the game and looked to finish him in a couple turns, he started stalling hard, after a few minute I eventually realised what he was doing and told him to play faster, he was Italian or something so he further stalled by pretending not to understand me (I had previously talked to him just fine in English).
Luckily although younger than my opponent and a bit flabergasted that he seemed to be trying to cheat me, I called a judge, quickly explained the situation, but my opponent tried stalling even more with the judge proclaiming his innocence in far too many words, the judge cut him off and asked for play to continue watching over us, I did my obvious plays quickly and when my opponent again got his turn and had to show his hand to the judge he had nothing that could possible alter the game and started stalling again, the judge gave him a warning that if he didnt make a play he would get a game loss.
The guy finally conceded a game that had been over for 10 minutes, snarling and muttering in italian at me and the judge before making his exit, I shared a smile with the judge and he just shaked his head, saying, im paraphrasing "Sadly cheats like these are very common and we cant catch everyone doing it".
Oh btw this was a limited grand prix and day 2 went horrible in the draft and I was quickly eliminated.
Ya know, in these really big tournament matches, the ones where its top 8ing or similar... Why did they never implement a 3rd party shuffling the decks when it is called for? They already have a judge watching. I guess cheating isn't *that* common but it also doesn't seem like a huge ask to have an outside influence touch the decks to shuffle in important matches
You can request a judge shuffle the deck. A seasoned opponent of Humphries' (I forget his name) did exactly that after he suspected him in the same tournament that Humphries won
@@Tehnameless1 Well, good that is an option :)
You are allowed to cut your deck ONCE after your opponent shuffled it when presented to cut. ONLY if they shuffled it. This better prevents both parties from stacking decks. I know this doesn't answer your questions, but it does show some initiative to make pregame actions more fair to all players and prevent cheating by stacking decks.
Missed Olivier Ruel, caught multiple times HOF, was all over 2000s Magic pro tour.
Olivier was hilarious. Never seen a person slide onto the ground desperately trying to see a reflection off his opponent's glasses quite like him.
If there's dozens of "accidents" and they're ONLY beneficial, they're not accidents.
I played at a store with, usually 8-12 people in 1996-98. There as a guy that kept cheating, then this ultra-awkward dude clocked him in the face when he caught him cheating. That was, of course, a poor choice.
@13:10 "these guys don't look that tough"🤣🤣🤣 this brings tears to my eyes
That whole thing was the cringest shit I’ve ever seen lmao.
@@natsudragneel9611 like a 90s infomercial. I would know I was there 😅
That was rough